Zombie Hunters (2008)

Okay, so the title on the image is a little misleading, mainly because I took a screen shot of the DVD’s menu, because I wanted you to know that THE FILM LOOKS NOTHING LIKE THIS, the girl in this image? Not a character, nor do the zombies look like that, nor are there any SWAT looking type characters and we don’t get any places that look remotely like the pollution saturated industrial wasteland we have here.
This image is mirrored in the DVD case, slightly misleading, don’t you think?
Don’t click the back button, here’s the image again.

In the future, nature is restricted and virtual games provide both the landscapes and the hunting grounds. A group of hunters will make it outside for a traditional hunt. Little do they know about what awaits them in the wild and how it will inevitably affect them. Set in the beautiful Canadian wilderness, in the French speaking province of Quebec, prepare to see a future, not so far from ours, where reality is somewhat more complex and intricate since the virtual world has reached an unprecedented level of reality that can easily fool your senses.

If you’ve been following my reviews (and if you haven’t, go read them all), you’ll know that I very rarely resort to copy and pasting a description of a film from it’s IMDB, this time however I really had to make an exception, the above was written by (apparently) the Australian distribution company for this film, so it doesn’t surprise me that it’s bigging up the film, I mean look at it, claiming Canadian Wilderness is beautiful… wait, what has that got to do with anything? It’s just a little confusing, I’m here for zombies, right?
What’s really laughable is that the film has a level of virtual reality that “can easily fool your senses”, what this translates to is bad Green Screen and low quality effects that could have been in a movie maker starter pack.
The plot line is tenuous at best, a future in which humanity has retracted back to… what looks like a regular street, so that Nature can reclaim the Earth, could have at least made it some bunker or a bio-dome or something, humanity is now using Virtual Reality and one of those number has grown tired of hunting in computer games and wants to do it for real.
So he and a few friends and co-conspirators break out of their utopia and go hunting for real.
All at the same time a secret experiment in reanimating damaged tissue goes awry and creates zombies.
Group A meets group B and most of group A die.

I tend to try to find something good to say about a film even if I think it’s completely bad, I’m the kind of guy who thinks peoples effort should be respected but in this situation it is hard to find something positive to say.
But I will say this, I love the concept, I just think various important parts of the world building were severely lacking.
I could forgive the low budget effects if they had only built the world, cause as it stands it is a case of being told the world went to hell without being shown anything about it, and there’s the old adage in film making of “Show, don’t tell” and what Zombie Hunters has shown us could be anywhere, any time in any situation, they didn’t build the world for me and that just left the entire thing feeling hollow.
All in the end, I would tell you that I spent £1 on this film, I got 93 minutes for that pound, and I feel it was worth every penny…